Installation

Installing a new CPU cooler of any sort is a tough job, no matter who makes it – it’s a function of the design of motherboards that there will, at the very least, be clips involved. In the case of The Eliminator, the standard clip design gets a number of modifications to fit a variety of motherboards. The result, unfortunately, is a bit of the worst of all worlds, as you’ll either need three arms or an assistant to install The Eliminator without any problems.

Here’s how it works:

• Step 1: Remove your old cooling system from your processor.
  
  
• Step 2: Remove one of the exhaust fans from the back of your case, so you can mount the cooler to it.
  
  
• Step 3: Figure out, depending on your processor type, which clips you’re going to be using. It looks like The Eliminator works with any Intel or AMD processor made in the past 3 or 4 years, so your option will be there.
  
  
• Step 4: Screw the mounting posts into your motherboard. You’ll be using thumbscrews to mount the clips into these posts in a minute or two.
  
  
• Step 5: Now comes the hard part: find a good way to balance the main body of the cooler while you place the cooling plate (pre-loaded with paste) on your processor and strap the plate down using those clips. Because the plate connects to the cooler via two flexible plastic tubes, it doesn’t really want to stay in one place and because the cooler itself sits right above the processor when mounted, you can’t mount the cooler before installing the plate. It also doesn’t help that those clips are tough to strap down using the thumbscrews – it took me a few tries to get everything set properly, what with the balancing and the moving plate and the difficult clips.
  
  
• Step 6: Once you’ve fitted the cooling plate over the processor and strapped it down, you can mount the cooler to the exhaust port. Although the cooler is a decent size and weighs a few pounds, I had no difficulty mounting it to the case wall using the included screws.
  
  
• Step 7: Connect a Molex plug from your power supply into the connector on the cooler. Molex connectors are getting pretty scarce in my case, so it would have been nice if The Eliminator had the option of using a SATA power supply plug instead.
  
  
• Step 8: If you’ve got a case like mine , you may find that you need to remove some case hardware before you can close the case door over your new cooler. In my case, the four fans mounted on the door had to go before I could close things up. This issue is really more of a problem with the case than the cooler, but if you’re relying on an array of case fans to help with cooling duties, you may need to find other solutions. 

Reviewer’s note: Three weeks after writing and publishing this article, my computer died unexpectedly.  After two days of tests and several trips to the store, I determined that the motherboard, an ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe, had died.  I replaced the board with a new copy of the same model and, on opening the box, discovered a part I had forgotten about since reviewing the board this past fall : a fan that mounts on the board’s heatsink when using a liquid-based cooler like the Eliminator.  I had neglected to put the fan onto the motherboard and thus eventually burned out the board.  As it turns out, you have to mount the fan and the Eliminator in the same spot, which means you can’t use the Eliminator with this board.  In other words, if you have an ASUS M2N32-SLI, don’t buy the Eliminator.  If you have a motherboard that includes one of those cooling fans, make sure its placement won’t conflict with that of the Eliminator. 

Operation

Once I had everything hooked up, I had no problems starting up my computer. One thing I’ve noticed over the 10 or so times I’ve started up since installation is that there appears to be some sort of burn-in period for The Eliminator before it starts working at full capacity – for the first few starts, both the BIOS and Windows took much longer to load (5 extra seconds for the BIOS and 10 extra seconds for Windows) than they had with the stock heatsink/fan. The startup time has now returned back to normal and processor temperatures, which were at 32º Celsius (after an hour of minimal operation) at the time of installation, have since dropped to 27º Celsius in the same time period. My recommendation would be to let The Eliminator tune itself up for a few days before trying to test the system with any overclocking.